I am alone and naked on the bare mattress as I hear him removing things from the drawer where the things that hurt live, and I am enjoying the last few moments of curling up and into myself. I press my thighs and forearms together, hold my own hands.

This is a memory from the early months of our relationship, when things and feelings were not as they are now. It’s also the origin story of how I ended up having a collar, which – since the events of this writing – has never left me.

I am having one of those bad days where nothing feels right, I’m convinced I’m coming down with something and I have cried in front of someone before lunchtime, but I still go and see Kristan, because I said I would.

I know he was intending to break me today, and I tell him that it won’t take much. I already want to cry when I realise what he’s doing, what he is going to do. He takes the duvet off the bed because, as he says, he can tell it’s comforting me. Watching him bundle it in his arms and dump it in the corner is viscerally so upsetting that words are insufficient to describe it. I feel it in my chest. Deep. He takes the pillows, too. I am alone and naked on the bare mattress as I hear him removing things from the drawer where the things that hurt live, and I am enjoying the last few moments of curling up and into myself. I press my thighs and forearms together, hold my own hands. He cuffs one wrist and pulls it to the corner of the bed – with some difficulty, as I am resisting. Not completely, but enough to convey my unwillingness for what is happening. I don’t want this. I have been broken by this before, and I still don’t want to break. I am still stubborn and proud and honestly, scared.

When my wrists are cuffed he puts rope around my ankles. I have interlocked my legs together and it takes a sharp blow to my flank to remind me who is in charge, what the agreement is here. Reluctantly I release one leg, let myself be spread open, although my body is still tensed and I am twisting and trying to find some place I can feel safe. With both ankles tied to the corners of the bed the feeling of vulnerability is completely unbearable. My wrists are attached to restraints below the mattress but I am strong enough that I can still pull my arms together, effectively folding the mattress in half. I have not appreciated my strength in this way before. I can feel him pausing, assessing this new situation. I do not want to resist in this way, but I physically cannot help it. If I can make myself smaller, if I can close myself off, I will. He switches to tying my wrists to the metal bed frame. First I pull one wrist free from the cuff. When he fixes that I break the cord of the other. I have lost my words and cannot express that I do not mean to do this, that I am scared and want to be good, that I cannot help being strong. It comes out as a whimper.

Eventually, eventually. He starts to hit me with the cane, eventually. I feel like I have lost already. Being restrained in this way has so reduced my ability to cope that I’ve given up before we’ve even started. It hurts so much that I cannot make myself stay still in any way at all and he has my wrists pulled so tight to the corners of the bed that I’m half-worried I’m going to dislocate a shoulder with how much my body is violently jerking every time he hits me. I can feel him trying to hold me down, make me still, and that hurts in a different way, that he has to do that. And it makes no difference. I am behaving like a mad thing. I can feel wetness slick on my thighs and it makes no sense to me because I am not aware of enjoying this the way I usually do. I feel baffled and angry at my own body. He stops hitting me to push something very large inside my arse and he holds it there whilst he continues to hit me. It helps, having another focus. But it starts to hurt too, as he pushes it deeper. And he is saying terrible things to me, hurtful things, he spits in my face and tells me he’s sick of hearing me, all those noises that I make. And then he has finished hitting me (and it feels like he was hitting me for no time at all and I am so ashamed that I couldn’t be still, couldn’t be good, that maybe he could have hit me for longer if I could just have been good) and instead he is fucking me and it is humiliating because of the awful things he is saying to me. He tells me if I can’t keep quiet he will fuck my arse instead and of course I cannot and so he does. And then it is over, and I haven’t cried but I have torn myself apart in my head because I could not be good and I can’t look at him or touch him and I just want to curl up in a ball but I can’t even move, even though he’s released all my limbs I am frozen, splayed in the middle of the bare mattress.

He tells me to look at him but I cannot. He tells me to look at him in a normal voice but I’m not back in a normal place yet and nothing feels normal and like it ever will again and it takes him repeating look at me in the other voice, the demanding tone with a hint of threat so I look at him. Not for long, but I do. And then I manage to touch him. And then I’m curled against him and my face is pressed against his neck and I can’t speak yet but the frozen place inside me is starting to melt and I can imagine that maybe, maybe I will be okay.

Later on we have dinner and the not-wellness I’ve been feeling all day has gotten the better of me and he has to take me to bed and let me lie down. I feel small, grateful. I want so much to be strong and I feel like tonight everything about me must be a disappointment.

But later. He tells me close my eyes and I reluctantly do so as he brings his face close to mine, and I am flinching and only just managing to not pull away, expecting some new cruelty or some familiar pain, and instead he is gently kissing my eyelids and I feel something inside me twist into a new sort of agony, one I do not know how to cope with at all.

He fucks me later before taking me home and it’s different. He tells me that I am good. He asks me if it hurts, which he always does so he can reinforce how stupid I am for wanting something so painful, or how he doesn’t care or how it isn’t going to stop. But this time he tells me that I am good, that I can be good for him, that I can do this. And it’s new to me and I am puzzled and I don’t know what to do with this but I feel so very small and I want so much to be good, I have realised. And of all the things, I come when he kisses me and I can hear him saying yes and that makes it happen again. And he is telling me, less gently, that I belong to him, that I am his. And that new agony flares again and the yes has come tumbling out of me so fast I didn’t even realise I was going to say it.

When he takes me home later we are just about to leave and I realise I am still wearing the collar he put on me, that I have been wearing all night. He lets me wear it home and that it makes me feel things I don’t really want to feel. The sore thing that has nothing to do with pain. And I wear it home and I keep it on and I cry, a little bit. Just a little bit. And then I go to bed, and when I wake up I look at the bruises on my arse and I realise he must have hit me more than I thought and I wonder if I was good, after all.